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Binding Spell: A Novel
A SMALL-TOWN FABLE OF TRANSFORMATION, MYSTERY, AND UNRULY MAGIC
"Binding Spell is a very funny and exceedingly well-crafted comic novel... Elizabeth Arthur asks what life would be like if it were true that our wishing for happiness – our working for it – negated misery and brought contentment into existence. Life would be, as Arthur demonstrates, wonderful, unpredictable, and above all, funny." ~ Chicago Sun-Times
"Like an offbeat, modern fairy tale...(a) funny and moving story. After a wonderful climax during which a tornado wreaks havoc in Felicity, the characters variously achieve passion, happiness, and balance. A tale full of wit and affection, Arthur's latest offering (after Bad Guys and Beyond the Mountain) also boasts the best collection of dogs in recent literature." ~ Publisher's Weekly
"Wonderfully benign and satisfying...as appreciative and good-natured as one of Shakespeare's merrier comedies – the ones in which the irrational acquire some common sense and the rationalists learn to have a jolly time." ~ Washington Post
"A Midwestern Midsummer's Night Dream." ~ Kirkus
The New Yorker called Elizabeth Arthur's first novel, Beyond the Mountain, "stunning...stark and subtle" and described her second, Bad Guys, as "inspired tragicomedy." But Arthur's previous books all unfolded in wild landscapes where survival and self-discovery were inextricably linked. In Binding Spell, Arthur gives us a comedy set in the American heartland which follows a motley cast of dreamers, eccentrics, and seekers of transformation who, in a world fraught with real and imagined danger, find a way to live happily ever after.
Howell Bourne believes an international banking conspiracy is causing American farms to fail, and when two professors from Russia visit the nearby college in Felicity, Indiana, he thinks God has encouraged him to kidnap them. His sister Bailey, an aspiring witch, and Maggie Esterhaczy, a psychologist obsessed with the threat of nuclear catastrophe, are two of the characters who get swept up in the ensuing events.
Also drawn into the turmoil are Ryland Guthrie, a hypochondriacal furniture-store owner; his brother Peale, Felicity's newly elected sheriff; and Ada Esterhaczy, an 86-year-old Hungarian herbalist who is fiercely determined to see her granddaughter Maggie pregnant. And of course, there are the dogs - perhaps the wisest souls in Felicity.
As a spring tornado bears down on the town, what begins in absurdity becomes something unexpectedly luminous – a wildly funny tale of small-town upheaval and a meditation on connection, structured like a spell itself.
The Chicago Tribune says about Binding Spell, "Exuberant...the book's most enduring spell is the one the author herself has cast, wrapping sage reflections on human foibles and capabilities, lost dreams, and new possibilities, in a mantle of buoyancy and wit." Booklist writes, "A warm, disarming novel...With great good humor and compassion for people's foibles, Arthur delicately constructs a sunny, near-magical tale of love and reconciliation," and the Albuquerque Journal writes, "For readers who bemoan the dropped threads and empty gestures of contemporary fiction...The novel's greatest strength lies in [Arthur's] seemingly effortless ability for unraveling plot, for charting her own planetarium, linking stars together in constellations you never dreamed of.
"Binding Spell is a very funny and exceedingly well-crafted comic novel... Elizabeth Arthur asks what life would be like if it were true that our wishing for happiness – our working for it – negated misery and brought contentment into existence. Life would be, as Arthur demonstrates, wonderful, unpredictable, and above all, funny." ~ Chicago Sun-Times
"Like an offbeat, modern fairy tale...(a) funny and moving story. After a wonderful climax during which a tornado wreaks havoc in Felicity, the characters variously achieve passion, happiness, and balance. A tale full of wit and affection, Arthur's latest offering (after Bad Guys and Beyond the Mountain) also boasts the best collection of dogs in recent literature." ~ Publisher's Weekly
"Wonderfully benign and satisfying...as appreciative and good-natured as one of Shakespeare's merrier comedies – the ones in which the irrational acquire some common sense and the rationalists learn to have a jolly time." ~ Washington Post
"A Midwestern Midsummer's Night Dream." ~ Kirkus
The New Yorker called Elizabeth Arthur's first novel, Beyond the Mountain, "stunning...stark and subtle" and described her second, Bad Guys, as "inspired tragicomedy." But Arthur's previous books all unfolded in wild landscapes where survival and self-discovery were inextricably linked. In Binding Spell, Arthur gives us a comedy set in the American heartland which follows a motley cast of dreamers, eccentrics, and seekers of transformation who, in a world fraught with real and imagined danger, find a way to live happily ever after.
Howell Bourne believes an international banking conspiracy is causing American farms to fail, and when two professors from Russia visit the nearby college in Felicity, Indiana, he thinks God has encouraged him to kidnap them. His sister Bailey, an aspiring witch, and Maggie Esterhaczy, a psychologist obsessed with the threat of nuclear catastrophe, are two of the characters who get swept up in the ensuing events.
Also drawn into the turmoil are Ryland Guthrie, a hypochondriacal furniture-store owner; his brother Peale, Felicity's newly elected sheriff; and Ada Esterhaczy, an 86-year-old Hungarian herbalist who is fiercely determined to see her granddaughter Maggie pregnant. And of course, there are the dogs - perhaps the wisest souls in Felicity.
As a spring tornado bears down on the town, what begins in absurdity becomes something unexpectedly luminous – a wildly funny tale of small-town upheaval and a meditation on connection, structured like a spell itself.
The Chicago Tribune says about Binding Spell, "Exuberant...the book's most enduring spell is the one the author herself has cast, wrapping sage reflections on human foibles and capabilities, lost dreams, and new possibilities, in a mantle of buoyancy and wit." Booklist writes, "A warm, disarming novel...With great good humor and compassion for people's foibles, Arthur delicately constructs a sunny, near-magical tale of love and reconciliation," and the Albuquerque Journal writes, "For readers who bemoan the dropped threads and empty gestures of contemporary fiction...The novel's greatest strength lies in [Arthur's] seemingly effortless ability for unraveling plot, for charting her own planetarium, linking stars together in constellations you never dreamed of.
378 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 14, 2026
About the author
Elizabeth Arthur
29 books21 followersElizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953 in New York City. She is the daughter of Robert Arthur, a fantasy, horror and mystery writer and the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people. She was educated at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, and the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C.
Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).
Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.
These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.
Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.
Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).
Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.
These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.
Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.
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